Sunday, December 29, 2013

As I said above -- sorry for my slow posting. I know this is not the most active blog on line ------ but --- this time it has nothing to do with my disgust with our politics, it's about a flooded house, my issues with my insurance company and problems with the folks who we contracted with to do the dry-out, demolition, and reconstruction. Neither happy, involved, nor committed at this time -- it's currently about survival.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Does anyone remember "The Dixie Chicks"? Remember how the right wing savaged them when they DARED criticize G.W. Bush in London? Remember how the right wing said freedom of speech means you can say it, but you can't control how folks react? Remember how they ruined careers when anyone DARED to speak out? Remember what they did to Bill Maher?

NOW, they say we have no right to react to the rantings of a phoney "redneck". In fact, the very same folks who DEFENDED virtual censorship of an independent singing group say a NETWORK with contractual rights has no right to discipline an employee. Try that with YOUR BOSS and claim "freedom of speech", esp. in a Southern State where "at will employment" is the rule.

Those "poor" Duck Dynasty folks, those scripted, real funny folks, who are just your typical down-to-earth millionaires, who appeared to be just plain old YUPPIES before they became a parody of real "rednecks", a parody of hard working folks who just dream of being "Duck Call Millionaires".

May the Robertson's rot in whatever place is reserved for all the phonies we see on "Reality TV"

Thursday, December 19, 2013

From Robert Reich - please follow link to original.
------------------------------------------------------------http://robertreich.org/

It’s the season to show concern for the less fortunate among us. We should also be concerned about the widening gap between the most fortunate and everyone else.

Although
it’s still possible to win the lottery (your chance of winning $636
million in the recent Mega Millions sweepstakes was one in 259 million),
the biggest lottery of all is what family we’re born into. Our life
chances are now determined to an unprecedented degree by the wealth of
our parents.

That’s not always been the case. The faith that
anyone could move from rags to riches – with enough guts and gumption,
hard work and nose to the grindstone – was once at the core of the
American Dream.

And equal opportunity was the heart of the
American creed. Although imperfectly achieved, that ideal eventually
propelled us to overcome legalized segregation by race, and to guarantee
civil rights. It fueled efforts to improve all our schools and widen
access to higher education. It pushed the nation to help the unemployed,
raise the minimum wage, and provide pathways to good jobs. Much of this
was financed by taxes on the most fortunate.

But for more than
three decades we’ve been going backwards. It’s far more difficult today
for a child from a poor family to become a middle-class or wealthy
adult. Or even for a middle-class child to become wealthy.

The
major reason is widening inequality. The longer the ladder, the harder
the climb. America is now more unequal that it’s been for eighty or more
years, with the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of all
developed nations. Equal opportunity has become a pipe dream.

Rather
than respond with policies to reverse the trend and get us back on the
road to equal opportunity and widely-shared prosperity, we’ve spent much
of the last three decades doing the opposite.

Taxes have been
cut on the rich, public schools have deteriorated, higher education has
become unaffordable for many, safety nets have been shredded, and the
minimum wage has been allowed to drop 30 percent below where it was in
1968, adjusted for inflation.

Congress has just passed a tiny
bipartisan budget agreement, and the Federal Reserve has decided to wean
the economy off artificially low interest rates. Both decisions reflect
Washington’s (and Wall Street’s) assumption that the economy is almost
back on track.

But it’s not at all back on the track it was on more than three decades ago. It’s certainly not on track for the
record 4 million Americans now unemployed for more than six months, or
for the unprecedented 20 million American children in poverty (we now
have the highest rate of child poverty of all developed nations other
than Romania), or for the third of all working Americans whose jobs are
now part-time or temporary, or for the majority of Americans whose real
wages continue to drop.

How can the economy be back on track when
95 percent of the economic gains since the recovery began in 2009 have
gone to the richest 1 percent?

The underlying issue is a moral one: What do we owe one another as members of the same society?

Conservatives
answer that question by saying it’s a matter of personal choice – of
charitable works, philanthropy, and individual acts of kindness joined
in “a thousand points of light.”

But that leaves out what we
could and should seek to accomplish together as a society. It neglects
the organization of our economy, and its social consequences. It
minimizes the potential role of democracy in determining the rules of
the game, as well as the corruption of democracy by big money. It
overlooks our strivings for social justice.

In short, it ducks the meaning of a decent society.

Last
month Pope Francis wondered aloud whether “trickle-down theories, which
assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will
inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and
inclusiveness…”. Rush Limbaugh accused the Pope of being a Marxist for
merely raising the issue.

But the question of how to bring about
greater justice and inclusiveness is as American as apple pie. It has
animated our efforts for more than a century – during the Progressive
Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, and beyond — to make capitalism
work for the betterment of all rather merely than the enrichment of a
few.

The supply-side, trickle-down, market-fundamentalist views
that took root in America in the early 1980s got us fundamentally off
track.

To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward
mobility we once considered normal will require another era of
fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy

I spent last week trooping through North Lawndale, on the West Side
of Chicago, with the Atlantic's video team. We spent much of Friday with
some positive folks over at the Better Boys Foundation (BBF)
in K-Town. Then we went outside to get some sense of the neighborhood.
I've spent a lot of time in North Lawndale over the past year. It is one
of the roughest neighborhoods in Chicago. It is also achingly
beautiful. Wide boulevards cut through the neighborhood, the old Sears
building looms in the distance, and the great greystones
mark many of the blocks. If you stand at the corner of Springfield and
Ogden, as I have, right next to the Lawndale Christian Health Center
across from Lou Malnati's Pizzeria, you can see the great wealth of
Chicago, indeed the great wealth of America, looming over all those who
long toiled to make it so.
That Friday, it snowed all day and we walked the blocks, Sam, Kasia,
Paul and me, with our guides, running mostly on the odd joy one gets
imbibes from the kind of exploration that should be what journalism is
about. Towards the end of the afternoon we were standing on a corner
shooting one of our hosts. Kids were walking home. We were standing on a
street designated as a route for Chicago's Safe Passage program.
Volunteers, bundled like scientists of the arctic, stood across the way,
nodding as children passed.
The afternoon was quiet. The street-lights were just beginning to
flirt. There was no sun. A group of older boys, with no books, came
aimlessly down the street. Our host called one of them over and hassled
him for not having stopped by BBF recently. BBF is a fortress in a
section of this long warred upon section of the city. Kids can go to BBF
to read, make beats, make video or play table-top hockey. The
conversation between our host and the kid was familiar to me. It was the
way men addressed me, as a child, when they were trying to save my
life. Aimlessness is the direct path to oblivion for black boys. Occupy
the child till somewhere around 25, till he passes out of his hot years,
and you may see him actually become something.
Catercorner to the volunteers of Safe Passage, two cops sat in an
SUV, snug and warm. Our video team was shooting the conversation between
our host and the kid. One of the cops rolled down his window and
yelled, "Excuse me you need to take your cameras off this corner. It's
Safe Passage."
I didn't know anything about Safe Passage
and the law. If the program prohibits video footage on a public street,
I haven't been able to document any record of it. But it is police,
after all, which is to say humans empowered by the state with the right
to mete out violence as he sees fit. We backed up a bit. Our host kept
talking. The cops yelled out again. "You need to move, bud. This is Safe
Passage." At this point our host yelled back and contentious back and
forth began. Things calmed down when one of our cameramen walked down
the street with our host to get a few different shots.
A few months ago, on one of my other trips to Chicago, I was at a
dinner with a group of wonks. The wonks were upset that the community,
and its appointed represenatives, would not support mandatory minimums
for gun charges. I--shamefully I now think--agreed with them. It's not
simply that I now think I was wrong, it's that I forgot my role. I mean
no disrespect to my hosts. But whenever reformers convene for a nice
dinner and good wine, a writer should never allow himself to get too
comfortable.
One of my friends, who grew up on the South Side, and was the only
other black male at the table, was the only one who disagreed. His
distrust of the justice system was too high.Perhaps this is why:

During his more than 30
years behind bars, Stanley Wrice insisted he was innocent, that Chicago
police had beat him until he confessed to a rape he didn't commit. On
Wednesday, he walked out of an Illinois prison a free man, thanks to a
judge's order that served as a reminder that one of the darkest chapters
in the city's history is far from over...

Wrice, who was sentenced to
100 years behind bars for a 1982 sexual assault, is among more than two
dozen inmates — most of them black men — who have alleged they were
tortured by officers under the command of disgraced former Chicago
police Lt. Jon Burge in a scandal that gave the nation's third-largest
city a reputation as haven for rogue cops and helped lead to the
clearing of Illinois' death row. Some of the prisoners have been freed;
some are still behind bars, hoping to get the kind of hearing that Wrice
got that eventually led to his freedom.

The scandal of Jon Burge,
which will trouble Chicago police for many years to come, is the worst
of something many black folks feels when interacting with police in any
city. Police address us with aggression, and their default setting is
escalation. De-escalation is for black civilians.
When the officer wanted us to move, there was a very easy way to
handle the situation. You step our your car. You introduce yourself. You
ask questions about what we're doing. If we are breaking the law, you
ask us to move. If we are not breaking the law and simply making your
life hard, we are likely to move anyway. You are the power.
The cop did not speak to us as though he were human. He spoke to us
like a gangster, like he was protecting his block. He was solving no
crime. He was protecting no lives. He was holding down his corner. He
didn't even bother with a change of uniform. An occupied SUV, parked at
an intersection, announces its masters intentions.
It was only a second day there, and our first real one out on the
street. It only took that short period to run into trouble. I was
worried about the expensive equipment. But it was the conventions of
community that protected us. People would walk up and ask us what we
were doing. I would tell them we were shooting the neighborhood, or had
just finished interviewing some elder--Mr. Ross, Mrs. Witherspoon--and
they would smile. "So Mr. Ross is famous, huh?"
No such social lubricant exists for the police. If you are young and
black and live in North Lawndale, if you live in Harlem, if you live in
any place where people with power think young black boys aren't being
stopped and frisked enough, then what happened to us is not a single
stand-out incident. It is who the police are. Indeed they are likely a
good deal worse.
What people who have never lived in these neighborhoods must get, is
that, like the crooks, killers, and gangs, the police are another
violent force that must be negotiated and dealt with. But unlike the
gangs, the violence of the police is the violence of the state, and thus
unaccountable to North Lawndale. That people who represent North
Lawndale laugh at the idea of handing over more tools of incarceration
to law enforcement is unsurprising.
As we were finishing up, the officer who yelled at us got out the car and asked for the driver of our vehicle. It wasn't me.
"I happened to notice your sticker is expired," the officer said, handing a ticket to Kasia.
"It's a rental," she replied.
"Well give it to them," he told her walking away. "They'll know what to do with it."
The cop got back in his heated car. On the other corner, Safe Passage stood there, awaiting children, huddling in the cold.

It’s charity time, and not just because the
holiday season reminds us to be charitable. As the tax year draws to a
close, the charitable tax deduction beckons.
America’s wealthy are its largest beneficiaries. According to the Congressional Budget Office,
$33 billion of last year’s $39 billion in total charitable deductions
went to the richest 20 percent of Americans, of whom the richest 1
percent reaped the lion’s share.
The generosity of the super-rich is sometimes proffered as evidence
they’re contributing as much to the nation’s well-being as they did
decades ago when they paid a much larger share of their earnings in
taxes. Think again.
Undoubtedly, super-rich family foundations, such as the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, are doing a lot of good. Wealthy philanthropic
giving is on the rise, paralleling the rise in super-rich giving that
characterized the late nineteenth century, when magnates (some called
them “robber barons”) like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller
established philanthropic institutions that survive today.
But a large portion of the charitable deductions now claimed by
America’s wealthy are for donations to culture palaces – operas, art
museums, symphonies, and theaters – where they spend their leisure time
hobnobbing with other wealthy benefactors.
Another portion is for contributions to the elite prep schools and
universities they once attended or want their children to attend. (Such
institutions typically give preference in admissions, a kind of
affirmative action, to applicants and “legacies” whose parents have been
notably generous.)
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy
institutions, to be sure, but they’re not known for educating large
numbers of poor young people. (The University of California at Berkeley,
where I teach, has more poor students eligible for Pell Grants than the
entire Ivy League put together.) And they’re less likely to graduate
aspiring social workers and legal defense attorneys than aspiring
investment bankers and corporate lawyers.
I’m all in favor of supporting fancy museums and elite schools, but
face it: These aren’t really charities as most people understand the
term. They’re often investments in the life-styles the wealthy already
enjoy and want their children to have as well. Increasingly, being rich
in America means not having to come across anyone who’s not.
They’re also investments in prestige – especially if they result in
the family name engraved on a new wing of an art museum, symphony hall,
or ivied dorm.
It’s their business how they donate their money, of course. But not
entirely. As with all tax deductions, the government has to match the
charitable deduction with additional tax revenues or spending cuts;
otherwise, the budget deficit widens.
In economic terms, a tax deduction is exactly the same as government
spending. Which means the government will, in effect, hand out $40
billion this year for “charity” that’s going largely to wealthy people
who use much of it to enhance their lifestyles.
To put this in perspective, $40 billion is more than the federal
government will spend this year on Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families (what’s left of welfare), school lunches for poor kids, and
Head Start, put together.
Which raises the question of what the adjective “charitable” should
mean. I can see why a taxpayer’s contribution to, say, the Salvation
Army should be eligible for a charitable tax deduction. But why,
exactly, should a contribution to the Guggenheim Museum or to Harvard
Business School?
A while ago, New York’s Lincoln Center held a fund-raising gala
supported by the charitable contributions of hedge fund industry
leaders, some of whom take home $1 billion a year. I may be missing
something but this doesn’t strike me as charity, either. Poor New
Yorkers rarely attend concerts at Lincoln Center.
What portion of charitable giving actually goes to the poor? The Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews looked into this, and the best he could come up with was a 2005 analysis
by Google and Indiana University’s Center for Philanthropy showing that
even under the most generous assumptions only about a third of
“charitable” donations were targeted to helping the poor.
At a time in our nation’s history when the number of poor Americans
continues to rise, when government doesn’t have the money to do what’s
needed, and when America’s very rich are richer than ever, this doesn’t
seem right.
If Congress ever gets around to revising the tax code, it might consider limiting the charitable deduction to real charities.

Martin Ssempa, the virulently anti-gay Ugandan pastor praised
by American Religious Right leaders, is an active Twitter user. Among
his recent gems, he has denounced the phrase “gay people” as an
“intellectual fraud.” (He prefers, “people who ‘do’ sodom vice acts.”)
He tweeted at Rev. Jesse Jackson that “Equality was hijacked by Gays.”
He griped about marriage equality in Hawaii and praised anti-equality
protesters in Taiwan.
Ssempa also promotes the work of other professional haters. He
recently put in a plug for anti-gay extremist Scott Lively’s book
“Redeeming the Rainbow.” And on December 6 he repeatedly tweeted a link
to a video “lecture” by Ayo Kimathi, promoter of a militant black
supremacist website called “War on the Horizon.”

Months earlier, Kimathi had been placed on leave from his Department
of Homeland Security job after the Southern Poverty Law Center exposed the hate-filled thrust of his website. In mid-November, Alex Seitz-Wald of National Journal published an article, “DHS Still Hasn’t Fired Black Supremacist Who Called for Mass Murder of Whites.”

Coincidentally, Ssempa’s multiple December 6 tweets promoting
Kimathi’s “Effeminization of the African Male Pt 1 – History of
Homosexuality,” came on the last day Kimathi was a DHS employee.

Perhaps Ssempa was attracted by the virulently anti-European tone of
Kimathi’s presentation. After all, Ssempa has been tweeting angrily
about Europeans promoting LGBT equality as a human rights issue. Sample
tweet: “Who gives the European the right to decide for Africans, that a
human (‘sodom) vice is now human right?

The video
Ssempa promoted is a lecture by Kimathi in which he explains that the
term “white sex” is a catch-all for rape, perversion, homosexuality,
pedophilia, and bestiality. He says it is a “filthy notion” that all
people are alike under the skin. Kimathi describes Christopher Columbus
as a “flaming homosexual,” child molester, and “small hat.” Kimathi says
“small hat” refers to “whites who commonly refer to themselves as
Jews.” They are, he says, “the worst of the worst of the Europeans. The
worst white group of all white groups is these whites who call
themselves Jews.”

This from "The Rude Pundit" - please read. Follow link to original.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------http://www.rudepundit.blogspot.com/

Denial of Medicaid Expansion Is a Job Killer:
(This one is clean for the kiddies.)

A just-released report
from the Commonwealth Fund shows how ideology has trumped common sense
when it comes to the states that have refused to expand Medicaid under
the Affordable Care Act (aka "Pearl Harbor + The Civil War x Pol Pot to
the power of Manson"). For, if you will remember, what the cruel Obama
administration wishes to do is give states 100% of the funding for the
first three years and, phased down over five years, about 90% thereafter
to get health coverage for their not-quite-as-desperate poor, those in
that not-exactly sweet spot between current Medicaid guidelines and qualifying for the insurance exchanges.

What are Bobby Jindal, Rick Scott, and other GOP governors forgoing?
"The value of new federal funds flowing annually to states that choose
to participate in the Medicaid expansion in 2022 will be, on average,
about 2.35 times as great as expected federal highway funds going to
state governments in that year and over one-quarter as large as expected
defense procurement contracts to states."

How about putting that in dollars? So, for instance, the Rude Pundit's
stupid home state of Louisiana would, if Jindal wasn't such a jerk
about it, get $2.3 billion in 2022 for Medicaid expansion. For highway
funds, the state gets $900 million. One of those numbers is bigger.

In that fantasy year of 2022, it would cost the state $280 million to
cover over 240,000 Louisianians. In other words, the state would get
roughly $9 for every $1 it spent. In otherer words, as a report in February from Family USA, the state is saying, "Hasta la vista" to jobs, too.

Remember how much Republicans want to talk about jobs except when it
comes to actually creating jobs? Remember how Ted Cruz goes on and on about the "job-killing" Obamacare? Yeah, not so much.

Because, see, expansion of Medicaid in Louisiana is projected to create
15,600 jobs. Why? Because there's a couple of billion dollars involved.
And what's even awesomer is that a chunk of that money will be spent on
wages. The Rude Pundit is no high-falutin' economist, but he's pretty
sure that means the wages will be taxed and spent, which is taxed also.
That seems like a pretty sweet deal all around.

Now, can someone explain how this is any different, truly, than, say, a
defense contract? Because it's all just federal money heading to
localities that then turn around and create jobs doing something for the
citizens of the nation.

Why do you think GOP governors like Rick Snyder and John Kasich have
jumped on the expansion train? Compassion? Hell no. It's for that cash
infusion at a time when the irrational budget sequester has circumcised
the budgets of the states with no hope in the near future of spending
returning to its pre-Tea Party levels.

Bottom line: If someone offered you $900 for the sweet price of $100,
you'd be a total jackass not to take it. Thus we know why Gov. Bobby
Jindal won't.

Once again I searched the far flung interwebs, those famed intertubes, to bring you fresh news. I actually found it. After being sick, after barfing, retching, rolfing, pukeing, I decided that THERE'S SOME STRANGE SHIT GOING ON.

About Me

I'm just another old woman who has had wide ranging interests for a long time,
These include fishing, shooting, reading, cooking, and all manner of (mostly) left wing politics.
Born and bred in New York - Queens, to be precise - I now live in Texas, another state that folks seem to attack (like N.Y.) without ever having been here.
I'm also a fan of most sports -- esp. baseball, esp. the New York Yankees.
Originally a New York Giants (baseball) fan, I was crushed when they moved. It took many years wandering in the wilderness before I returned to baseball. I's all Wade Boggs fault. When I watched that artist, my love for baseball resurfaced. Since he was then a Yankee -- it had to be the Yankees.
The Mets pretended they had spiritual ties to the old Brooklyn Dodgers - no Giant fan could go there.
I tried - couldn't do it.